Poll: Most Useful Computer Device

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

I love my squeePC.
Yes I just called it that.
I had one of the first gen ones and killed it after a year, now I have one of the newer ones with the bigger keys and it's pretty awesome.

It runs everything I need, which isn't much but it never crashes and it fits in my purse. You can get the 9 cell battery if you don't feel like carrying around the power cords, but they're really small too.

[Triple Zero]

For those of you with netbooks - do you find the lower specs prohibitive? Like is it slow, crashes often, that sort of thing? Where is the best place these days to buy a netbook or laptop?

I never had a problem with the lower specs. After all, they're just as powerful as a desktop computer 5 years ago.

If anything, RAM is cheap and you can upgrade it from 1GB to 2GB for not much. It's a good and cheap way to give it a boost if, after owning it for a while, performance seems to start dragging.

Mine is a Medion E1212 Akoya, which is the ALDI rebrand of the MSI Wind. I have no idea how it compares to the (seemingly more popular) EEE PC, but the specs seem pretty much the same.
Only difference I can tell is that the EEE seems to have a bigger "border" while being somewhat the same size so the screen and keyboard look a littlebit smaller, but this might be a bit of an optical illusion, I never compared them side-by-side.

I bought mine for 330 euros last year in march, and I haven't had a personal desktop computer since. Didn't miss it either, except a few weeks ago when I was trying to learn OpenGL 3D graphics programming and it turned out the graphics card in the netbook didn't support OpenGL 2.0.

For some reason, the specs of the average netbook are still pretty much the same as a year ago (1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB harddisk), but they got slightly cheaper.

Things to look out for that make a difference in quality are mostly the battery life. For instance, the Medion E1210 has a 3 cell battery, while the E1212 has a 6 cell. I suppose that doubles the battery life and this is totally worth it, don't skimp on that. Freshly charged, with WiFi turned off and the screen backlight turned to minimum, no USB devices, and webcam off, mine can go for 5.5 hours. It could very well be that newer models have even better battery life.

Another thing to consider is whether you get a regular harddisk or a SSD [solid-state-drive]. SSDs have less storage capacity, but they are a LOT faster (which you will notice as general system performance especially when task-switching, since Windows swaps memory to disk if it's not used immediately), and they don't have any moving parts. Which is awesome, because it means you can drop your netbook and it won't break, quickly. Similarly to how you can drop a mobile phone and it still works. A regular harddisk has a spinning disk and is very vulnerable to shocks if it's busy doing stuff.

As for the Operating System, currently I'm running WindowsXP which does its job very well. Don't get Vista, it just wasn't made with netbooks in mind. I hear that Windows7 runs again pretty well on netbooks since by then Microsoft noticed these less powerful devices are kinda popular. Of course there are several versions of Linux that you can use as well (easiest one probably being the Ubuntu Netbook edition).

The screen is just 1024x600 pixels, but with a few tricks you can use that space most optimally. I usually run all my applications maximized, except for file-explorer windows to drag-n-drop files between directories. The trick is preserving vertical space since you got least of that. So I moved the windows taskbar to the left of the screen, set it to auto-hide (which doesn't work very well in XP) and turned off its always-on-top toggle. This means you just about never see it and if you need it, you need to press WindowsKey+B to bring it to the front. I'd have preferred it if the auto-hide feature in XP worked better (then I could have done without the Win+B key, but as it is, sometimes it just doesn't hide, which sucks), but the slight hassle is worth the extra screen space. [my screen looks like this]

I wrote up a bunch of general tips about netbooks to Ms Freeky here:
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=24906.msg877547#msg877547

[Triple Zero]

I love my squeePC.
Yes I just called it that.
I had one of the first gen ones and killed it after a year, now I have one of the newer ones with the bigger keys and it's pretty awesome.

It runs everything I need, which isn't much but it never crashes and it fits in my purse. You can get the 9 cell battery if you don't feel like carrying around the power cords, but they're really small too.

wow they have 9 cells now? AWESOME!

Cram GET AS MUCH CELLS AS YOU CAN, DONT CELL YOURSELF SHORT

[Kai]

I've got the 12" Eee PC from Asus and i like it.
It gets the job done for fucking around on the intarwebs....
its light and slim.  isn't too darned expensive....

just one datapoint

I agree with the EeePC assessment. Damn near indestructible, incredibly portable; no good for gaming, but who the fuck wants to use a screen that small for gaming anyway?

I bring it with me when I travel and use it in the office.

[Cramulus]

you guys are being INCREDIBLY HELPFUL and INSIGHTFUL

awarded to all participants!